The Fire This Time

Disaster enthralls us. Aghast, we lean toward the diorama of the TV set to peer at the victims in their cursed worlds: rivers of silt and exploded debris, gathered into the camera’s voracious caress. We shudder at the images—a silver Mercedes wrapped around a stone embankment in Paris, a smattering of sequins alongside a ripped airplane wing, the killing of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, the Twin Towers collapsing in clouds of deadly dust fields and smoke. We are both moved to compassion and repelled by the contemplation of such human misery, but we look nonetheless. In hushed tones we compare the prurient details of kidnappings or senseless accidents, war crimes, terrorist attacks or incidents of domestic terror, thinking: There but for the grace of God (or fate or chance or privilege) go I.

Accompanying each witnessing is speculation: How would I react if a tornado snatched my house into the sky? If a tsunami suddenly rose up and licked my village clean? If I were the housewife clutching my robe against the night chill as sirens descended on the wasps’ nest of flames that was once my home, what would I try to save? Would I try to run back in for the dog? Would I cry?

Ten years ago, these thoughts were as far from my mind as the mythical gardens of Babylon. A recent medical scare had preoccupied me for the better part of a year, but the latest test results were cause for cautious celebration. Having already survived one disaster, I let down my guard; surely lightning doesn’t strike twice.

Or does it? Labor Day, 1998: My husband and I had just returned from Staunton, Virginia, one hour away, where we’d attended the opening reception of a friend’s art exhibit at Mary Baldwin College, an occasion doubling as an excuse to see our daughter Aviva, who was starting her sophomore year there. By the time we had returned home it was getting dark; we shed our sticky clothes (in the South, the dog days of summer take on apocalyptic proportions), and had settled into air conditioned bliss as a soft stuttering at the windows announced the first rain in weeks, hopefully the harbinger of the new season.

Where were you / when the lights went out / in New York City? So went the refrain of a popular song from the Seventies. Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated and Martin Luther King—then Malcolm, then Bobby, and what about Kent State? Where were you when the world changed forever?

I was in two places: in our bedroom, where Star Trek: The Next Generation was blasting away in full color; and across the hall in my study, pecking sporadically at a questionnaire my publisher hoped would provide stimulus for the upcoming publicity planned around my new poetry book. Whenever there was a commercial, I would scurry back to the computer to answer another marketing question: addresses of bookstores I frequented, names of newspapers and reviewers sympathetic to my work. Although it was hours before I planned to go to bed, I had changed straight from street clothes into my recent birthday present, a peach silk nightgown and robe, extravagantly printed with Gauguinesque fruit.

And then, the lights went out—with a bang so loud I couldn’t think, the explosion so intense it seemed to happen inside me: All thoughts were blasted clear of my body, so that I felt only a mild wonder when I discovered, seconds later, that if I blinked my eyes I still saw nothing; although through the scattered sounds of beeping back-up systems, hard rain on the skylight, and the delayed tinkling of glass—glass?—I could hear, faintly, my husband’s panicked shout.

The next sequence of events happened as if in a dream: Fred and I found each other in the hallway—he had been hurled across his room by the blast, hence the outcry—and went downstairs together in search of candles and flashlights; then, flashlights in hand, we hurried into the basement to shut off the main fuse box, thinking that lightning had struck nearby...